Friday, May 24, 2019

The lure of literalism

Mainly in social sciences, there's a popular genre of papers built around supposedly showing that commonly recognized nonliteral associations are in fact literal. Pulling the the corners of your mouth back actually makes you happy. Striking a self-assured pose actually changes your body chemistry to make you more confident. Linguistic forms that encourage people to use first person pronouns make societies less likely to promote education and other institutions that make individuals more independent. 

The studies are overwhelmingly based on questionable observational data or experimental approaches so contrived or round-about that they would make Rube Goldberg dizzy. This would be a good time to start an in-depth discussion of why these obviously flawed studies are so consistently appealingly, but that would take too much effort so I'm just going to play off the Goldberg reference and post a couple of very cool OK GO videos.










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